Nationalism Means War

Redrawing borders rarely ends well

"20150220_123307" by Journalist/Dutch RTL News/Berlin is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

In January 1995, French President François Mitterrand gave a prescient speech to the European Parliament about “the mutual enmity of the peoples of Europe.” It was a few months before he stopped being head of state and a year before his death. He urged Europeans to build a future based on peace and reconciliation instead of passing on a culture of mutal hatred to younger generations.

“What I am asking you to do is almost impossible, because it means overcoming our past,” Mitterrand said. “And yet, if we fail to overcome our past, let there be no mistake about what will follow: Ladies and gentlemen, nationalism means war! War is not only our past, it could also be our future!”

We have seen with our eyes recently that Mitterrand was right. Vladimir Putin’s war-mongering is based on the idea that Ukraine isn’t a real country. Instead, he sees Ukraine and Russia as one nation. This justifies a massive invasion, in his own mind at least. Nationalism means war.

The unit of analysis for the nationalist is the nation, a group of people (or tribe) who share a language, a culture, an ethnicity, a common descent and - in the imagination of the nationalist - a destiny. Nationalists seek to draw borders in a way that will bring the tribe together, while closing off outsiders.

Sadly, the whole idea of redrawing borders in an optimal way is based on a huge misunderstanding: Reality is messy. Geneticist David Reich teaches us that our genome is derived from ancestral fragments. If we go back ten generations, we will have around 757 ancestral stretches of DNA, but 1,024 ancestors - we don’t inherit DNA from all our ancestors. If we go back 50,000 years, our genome is scattered across more ancestral stretches of DNA than there were in any population at the time. Neat stories about a group of people living separately from their neighbours fail at the first hurdle.

As we move back through human history, we can see that diversity is the norm. People move around; and even those that stay in one place often fall in love with newcomers and outsiders. Before modern states, languages often existed as a dialect continuum. Even today, more than half the world’s population are bilingual or multilingual.

Nationalism is a modern invention. It has its roots in French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about popular sovereignty in the 18th century and began to take hold with the French Revolution of 1789. The ideology grew steadily through the 19th century, as centralized states standardized languages and organized religion began to wither.

The high-water mark of nationalism probably came between the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria (1938). The Treaty of Versailles was based on the self-determination of nations. However, key terms were left undefined as the victors of World War I drew up new borders. The attempt to divide the world into nations with rational borders soon ran into difficulties, such as the genocide of ethnic minorities in the runup to the treaty and violent population exchanges afterwards. The Nazis took these dark tendencies to their logical conclusions by using death camps and invasions to redraw Germany’s borders.

Following World War II, the American victors thought long and hard about the mistakes their predecessors had made with the Treaty of Versailles. The solution to Europe’s dark history would prove to be much more subtle than the clunky nation-building a generation previously.

The cornerstone of the new approach was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which was founded in 1949. Article 5 meant that an attack on one NATO member would be an attack on all. Its signatories committed to democracy based on individual rights, which would implicitly protect minorities. In 1952, five founding members of NATO plus West Germany (which would join NATO three years later) formed the European Coal and Steel Community, which later evolved into the European Union (EU).

The underlying aim behind the EU is antithetical to nationalism, as Mitterrand realized. Instead of seeing countries as nation-states, they are legal entities, which include minorities but might not include every speaker of a language. Instead of trying to conquer one another, European countries commit to mutual defence. Instead of vying to be top dog, they tie their economies together. Instead of jealously guarding their sovereignty, they pool it. Instead of trying to redraw the map, they have been removing passport controls at their borders since 1985. Instead of restricting people to the countries of their birth, citizens have the right to live wherever takes their fancy within the EU.

Although Ukraine isn’t a member of the EU, Volodymyr Zelensky, its President, embodies the pluralism at the heart of the European project. He is the Jewish leader of a country where more than 80% of the population are Orthodox Christians. He is also a native speaker of Russian, like around a third of the population. Around two thirds are native speakers of Ukrainian.

If nationalists agree to leave borders where they happen to sit, the result of the European project should be more diversity, more messiness and more bilingualism and multilingualism as well as increasing numbers of people with complex multi-layered identities.

On the other hand, any attempt to redraw the borders of EU member states goes against the current of integration and - as Putin has shown us all - will probably lead to bloodshed. It is better to overcome past hatreds than to dwell obsessively on them, as Mitterrand realized. See you next week!

Further reading

Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich

Nationalism: A Religion by Carlton J.H. Hayes

Matthew Yglesias on the case for Habsburg federalism

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[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.